Poll Watch: PPP MN 2012

39 Responses to “Poll Watch: PPP MN 2012”

1. Matthew E. Miller Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:24 am

   And a funny thing; Palin probably plays better in Minnesota than in other blue-states. Alaskans and Minnesotans have similar accents, and Minnesotans do considerably more fishing and hunting than do almost any blue state residents. Culturally, there are obvious connections (it’s not for nothing that Minnesota was less blue, relatively, than it was in 2004). I don’t really understand why they only used Palin and Pawlenty though; it’d be more interesting to compare someone like Romney, who might actually play well in Minnesota. My guess? Mitt would be down by 12-14 points at this juncture.

2. Tommy Boy Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:24 am

   It’s a little stunning to me that Palin’s favorables among Republicans and conservatives are equal to Pawlenty’s favorables among Republicans and conservatives in the state.

3. Tommy Boy Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:29 am

   Miller,

   How likely is it that only 27% of the Minnesota electorate is Republican? The D/R/I split was 40/36/25 in the 2008 exit poll and Minnesota’s indies lean to the left.

   Obama’s indy number is a lot better in this state than where he is nationally with PPP’s indy polling.

4. Illinoisguy Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:35 am

   Gentlemen, any idea why Pawlenty’s favorables have dropped considerably?

5. greg Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:35 am

   speaking of 2012 I think the RNC should have 2012 convention in a city like denver!

6. Kristofer Lorelli Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:37 am

   “Gentlemen, any idea why Pawlenty’s favorables have dropped considerably?”

   It is a PPP poll.

7. Matthew E. Miller Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:39 am

   IllinoisGuy,

   Because Pawlenty unalloted (cut) 3 billion dollars recently and every paper in the state has been beating the “go-it-alone, dictatorial, meany, radical conservative Pawlenty” drumbeat for over a month now. “He cut healthcare for those making under 8000….ahhh!”

8. MWS Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:41 am

   Illinois,

   For one, the pollster isn’t the best.

   But incumbent governors in general are seeing their numbers go down. They have to tough job of balancing budgets in an economic downturn. Nobody likes to see spending slashed and/or taxes raised, but these governors (some of them) are doing what needs to be done. Obama, on the other hand, can fire up the printing presses, make more promises, and smile for his adoring media.

9. Matthew E. Miller Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 11:42 am

   And Tommy Boy, why do you find it stunning that Palin’s favorables among Republicans/Conservatives are close to Pawlenty’s (Pawlenty’s are actually higher, but not statistically higher)? Nationally, Palin’s favorables among Republicans and Conservatives are routinely higher than Romney’s, Huckabee’s, Newt’s. Republicans and conservatives love Palin. Add to that the fact that Pawlenty was not the choice of the state’s most conservative voters 8 years ago (Brian Sullivan was), and it makes plenty of sense to me.

10. Jonathan Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    #5:

    From what I’ve read, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and San Antonio have all expressed an interest in hosting the Convention. Orlando or Tampa might also consider hosting it.

11. MWS Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    Matthew

    #1

    Minnesota is an interesting state. It, along with Wisconsin and Michigan, have about the only rural areas in the north that routinely vote Democrat. The state also has two of the most pro-life Democrats in Congress (Peterson and Oberstar) elected from rural areas.

12. Matthew E. Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:47 am

    MWS,

    That’s another point. Minnesota is very rural comparatively. Pawlenty, who’s more of an exurban guy, ran well behind Bush in some of the rural areas in the Republican Northwest. So that benefits Palin too; she’d probably poll better than Bush in that region but be massacred in the population dense Twin Cities area.

13. Tommy Boy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:49 am

    Miller,

    Aren’t the Republicans comprised of more moderates than the national party? If so, then I’m pretty stunned that a person considered as conservative as Palin would be equal to Pawlenty in terms of favorables/unfavorables [net] among this group.

14. MWS Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:52 am

    I noticed in the automated poll that Obama was always listed first in preference question.

    There is a reason that credible pollsters rotate the choices.

15. Thunder Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:54 am

    # Jonathan Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    #5:

    From what I’ve read, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and San Antonio have all expressed an interest in hosting the Convention. Orlando or Tampa might also consider hosting it.

    Lets do it in Orlando, then I can rent out my house for lots of bucks.

16. Matthew E. Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:56 am

    The PPP Minnesota polls don’t really read right to me. I’ve always been struck by something pretty peculiar about Minnesota; it’s one of the few states I’ve found that has a more Democratic over 65 population. Pawlenty lost the over 65 population in 2006 by 9 points; he actually did better in the 18-29 demographic (every age demographic in fact). Mark Kennedy, the Republican Senatorial candidate that year, experienced something almost identical; he lost those over 65 by a whopping 28%; he came with 20 points in the 18-29 demographic. Etc. My guess is, this is some sort of lingering Minnesota Miracle/Mondale/McCarthy effect. Those who lived through the age of great DFL’ers remain strongly Democratic; those who didn’t are drifting rightward. Only problem; we don’t see any of that in these PPP Minnesota polls. Palin and Pawlenty both do better than average in the 65 and older demographic. Odd.

17. Aron Goldman Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:57 am

    Among Moderates

    Favorable/Unfavorable (Net)
    Palin 25% / 65% (-40%)

    Job Approval
    Pawlenty 34% / 56%

    2012 Match-ups

    Obama 63%
    Pawlenty 28%

    Obama 70%
    Palin 20%

    Among Independents

    Favorable/Unfavorable (Net)
    Palin 40% / 52% (-12%)

    Job Approval
    Pawlenty 48% / 43%

    2012 Match-ups
    Obama 47%
    Pawlenty 40%

    Obama 52%
    Palin 34%

    Among Women

    Favorable/Unfavorable (Net)
    Palin 34% / 56% (-22%)

    Job Approval
    Pawlenty 37% / 53%

    2012 Match-ups
    Obama 56%
    Pawlenty 35%

    Obama 60%
    Palin 31%

18. Tommy Boy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 12:00 pm

    Culver in Trouble but Sarah has some new Iowa Friends!
    http://theiowarepublican.com/home/2009/07/09/culver-in-trouble-but-sarah-has-some-new-iowa-friends/

    The polling results released by TheIowaRepublican.com this morning paint a troubling picture for Governor Chet Culver. I’m sure a lot of people will be talking about his job approval number, the right track/wrong track stuff, but all that really matters is that only 36% of Iowans want to reelect this guy.

19. Matthew E. Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 12:03 pm

    Tommy Boy,

    Not really. Minnesota has one of the more conservative blue-state Republican party’s. Almost every Republican looking at a 2010 run for Governor is pro-life and rated highly by the Minnesota Taxpayers League. In the 2002 Republican primary you had Pawlenty on the left, and Brian Sullivan, who favored NO exceptions for abortion and was equally conservative everywhere else, on the right; Pawlenty won the state party’s endorsement by like 2 votes, and he trailed almost the entire run-up because the state party leaders had gotten behind Sullivan early. Mark Kennedy, the 2006 Republican Senatorial nominee, was a 92 lifetime ACU congressman. And Norm Coleman- about as moderate as you can get statewide and win a statewide Republican nomination- had been a former conservative Democrat, and is vociferously pro-life. Minnesota’s actually remarkably conservative for a blue-state and Minnesota’s Republican Party compares favorably to, say, the Virginia Republican Party.

20. Matthew E. Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Another example; the last GOP Governor, before Pawlenty, was Arne Carlson. Arne was a genuine moderate and he ran in 1990 without the state party’s endorsement.

21. Tommy Boy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 12:11 pm

    Miller,

    A fair reading of the crosstabs in this poll is that Palin and Pawlenty are viewed just as favorably among moderate Republicans as their Republican numbers are equal without there being a split among the overall conservative number.

    You don’t find it surprising at all that perhaps “moderate” Minnesota Republicans view the Alaskan governor just as favorably as “moderate” Minnesota Republicans view their own home state governor?

22. Matthew E. Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    Tommy Boy,

    I’m not sure why that seems like a fair reading to you: Palin is viewed slightly more favorably among conservatives, while Pawlenty is viewed slightly more favorably by Republicans. And among all moderates, Palin has -40 favorables while Pawlenty has -22 favorables. This would all suggest that Pawlenty has higher favorables with moderate Republicans. And no, I’m not surprised that it’s close; so-called moderate Republicans aren’t all that moderate anymore. Most of the “moderate Republicans” have become independents or Democrats. If only 27% of respondents are Republicans in this poll, then that’s lower than the 30% of voters who identified as conservatives in 2008 (a group that went for McCain 83 to 15).

23. Aron Goldman Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    A Farewell to Harms
    Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.
    By PEGGY NOONAN
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html#printMode

    Sarah Palin’s resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.

    Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

    In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m.

    In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

    McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

    To wit, “I love her because she’s so working-class.” This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they’re working class “tropes.” Because, you know, that’s what they teach in “Ways of the Working Class” at Yale and Dartmouth.

    What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

    “She’s not Ivy League, that’s why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don’t have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism.” This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it’s included in U.S. News and World Report’s top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named “Abe,” and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

    America doesn’t need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

    “The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

    “She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

    “She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes.” She shows your cynicism.

    “Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues.” Mrs. Palin’s supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think “not thoughtful” is a working-class trope!

    “The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

    “Turning to others means the media won!” No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn’t the media want to keep that going?

    Here’s why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

    Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

    The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

    It’s not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won’t be that way.

    We are going to need the best.

24. Aron Goldman Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 12:44 pm

    More on Palin and Her ‘Outside the Base’ Challenge
    By Mark Blumenthal
    http://www.pollster.com/blogs/more_on_palin_and_her_outside.php

    Voters like a steady hand
    By John Del Cecato
    http://thehill.com/john-del-cecato/voters-like-a-steady-hand-2009-07-09.html

25. Aron Goldman Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 1:04 pm

    Then Again, She Never Blinks
    by Conor Friedersdorf
    http://ideas.theatlantic.com/2009/07/then_again_she_never_blinks.php

    Michael Goldfarb writes:

    Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is the top choice for those Republicans who put national security first and ties Romney for first among voters who list economic issues alone as the priority.

    In a perfect world national security conservatives would probably choose Cheney as the 2012 nominee, but he wasn’t on the Rasmussen list, and folks shouldn’t be terribly surprised that Palin comes out on top in this breakdown.

    As a voter for whom foreign policy is my top priority, I think it is absolutely nutty that Sarah Palin is the top choice for these folks. She doesn’t have any foreign policy experience at all! Nor has she articulated any insights, opinions, or guiding philosophies that would shape her decision-making on these matters.

    It is deeply irrational to believe that putting Sarah Palin in the White House rather than another Republican would improve America’s national security. Of course, the fact that Dick Cheney would head America’s foreign policy in Michael Goldfarb’s perfect world demonstrates that his judgment on these matters is quite different from my own. Even so, can Goldfarb possibly think that Sarah Palin would make the next best choice?

26. MWS Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 1:18 pm

    Matthew,

    ” I’ve always been struck by something pretty peculiar about Minnesota; it’s one of the few states I’ve found that has a more Democratic over 65 population.”

    According to Barone’s Almanac, the same holds true for North Dakota. In the upper Midwest, the young are more Republican than the old, contra most of the rest of the country. It’s probably one of the reasons MN has been trending red the last decade or so.

27. Aron Goldman Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 1:35 pm

    Beyond the Palin
    Why the GOP is falling out of love with gun-toting, churchgoing, working-class whites.
    by Rick Perlstein
    http://www.newsweek.com/id/206098/output/print

    The conservative opinion elite is divided—irreconcilably so—about Sarah Palin’s decision to quit the Alaska governorship. One faction says good riddance: The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer had already judged her unfit for national office 24 hours before her announcement, and The New York Times’s Ross Douthat now refers to her “brief sojourn on the national stage” in the past tense. On the other side, the Post’s William Kristol called Palin’s quitting a “high-risk move” designed to catapult her to greater public prominence. Taking the longer view, though, the clash is symptomatic of the deepest strategic debate in Republican circles since the disciples of the Reagan revolution captured Congress in 1994.

    For decades it has remained a Republican article of faith: white, lower-middle-class, “heartland” masses, fundamentally socially conservative, were an inexhaustible electoral resource. So much so that Bill Clinton made re-earning their trust—he called them the Americans who “worked hard and played by the rules”—the central challenge in rebuilding Democratic fortunes in the 1990s. And in 2008 the somewhat aristocratic John McCain seemed to regard bringing these folks back into the Republican fold so imperative that he was moved to make the election’s most exciting strategic move: drafting churchgoing, gun-toting unknown Sarah Palin onto the GOP ticket.

    But beneath the surface, some Republicans have been chafing at the ideological wages of right-wing populism. In intellectual circles, writers like David Brooks and Richard Brookhiser have argued for a conservatism inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the least democratic of the Founding Fathers, over one spiritually rooted in Thomas Jefferson, the most democratic. After Barack Obama’s victory, you heard thinkers like author and federal judge Richard Posner lamenting on his blog that “the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.”

    Such discomfort has been dormant for some time. Under the influence of philosophical gurus like Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol, the sotto voce tradition arose of flattering the sort of voter who drove a pickup truck even if he wasn’t the sort you might want to socialize with. (Take, for example, “jes’ folks” Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Long before his jet-setting affair, after all, he met the jet-setting, Georgetown-educated Yankee investment banker who became Mrs. Sanford at a Hamptons beach party.) But Palin has raised the “class” question publicly among conservatives as seldom before.

    Michael Barone, writing in March on U.S.News’s Thomas Jefferson Street blog, noted that the electorate’s portion of “under-30 downscale whites” has been stagnating, while the participation of both young upscale whites and African-Americans generally has spiked upward. The pool is shrinking; thus he thinks Republicans should now focus on wooing upscale whites, banking on their disenchantment with Obama’s moves to fix the economy. Author and former Bush speechwriter David Frum recently made the argument, on the occasion of the split between Palin’s single 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, and the 19-year-old father of her child, that “it is marriage that creates culturally conservative voters—and young downscale Americans are not getting married. When they do marry, they do not stay married: While divorce rates among the college educated have declined sharply since the 1970s, divorce rates among high school graduates remain ominously high.” In a much-discussed blog post titled “Bristol’s Myth,” Frum cited statistics showing that white women without a college degree are far more likely to have a child out of wedlock than their college-educated counterparts. He concluded that “the socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage—and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.”

    It was a strange argument to make. This is the kind of statistical story liberals frequently tell: they will note that the states that vote most heavily Republican are the ones with the highest divorce rates, teenage births, and usage of online pornography—the highest rates of sin. They mean to sting conservatives with the charge of hypocrisy: “See? Conservatives aren’t more ‘moral’ after all.” Such claims, though, misunderstand a basic underpinning of conservative philosophy: human beings become civilized not through the absence of sin but the conscious struggle with sin. Sin is bad; but the true offense is sin in the absence of guilt—an indifference to the notion that there are moral boundaries even worth recognizing. Conservatism is usually most politically successful in religiously orthodox precincts where anxiety over the modern-day collapse of visible moral boundaries is most evident. That Americans sin a lot so we can’t hope for them to vote conservatively is a new claim.

    Why the change? For one thing, populism has never been an entirely comfortable fit for elite conservatives. Majorities of middle-class Americans can be persuaded to support tax cuts for the rich—even repeal of the estate tax—out of an optimism that they may eventually become rich themselves. But they are also susceptible to appeals like the one George Wallace made in the recession year of 1976. He built his campaign on both hellfire-and-brimstone moralism and a pledge of soak-the-rich tax policies. The elite conservative fears that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class. That fear surfaced recently when Rush Limbaugh—whom Frum himself has singled out as one of the dangerous populists dragging the Republicans down—dismissed those who criticized the AIG bonuses as “peasants with their pitchforks” who must be silenced for the sake of conservative orthodoxy. But it’s harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That’s starting to make some conservatives nervous.

    Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots. In postwar America, a panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency. In the Kennedy years, the right-wing militia known as the Minutemen armed for what they believed would be an imminent Russian takeover. In the Carter years it was the Posse Comitatus; Bill Clinton’s rise saw six anti-abortion murders and the Oklahoma City bombings. Each time, the conservative mainstream was able to adroitly hive off the embarrassing fringe while laying claim to some of the grassroots anger that inspired it. Now the violence is back. But this time, the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find. This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O’Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O’Reilly’s claim that “Tiller the baby killer” was getting away with “Nazi stuff” helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller’s alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

    At least in the past, those who wished to represent their movement as cosmopolitan and urbane could simply point to William F. Buckley as the right’s most prominent spokesman. Now Buckley is gone, and the most prominent spokesmen—the Limbaughs and O’Reillys and Becks—can be heard mouthing attitudes once confined to the violent fringe. For the second time in three months, Fox heavily promoted anti-administration “tea party” events this past Fourth of July—rallies in praise of secession and the Articles of Confederation, at which speakers “joked” about a coup against the communist Muslim Barack Obama like the one against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. “What’s going on at Fox News?” Frum recently asked, excoriating Beck for passing out to followers books by the nutty far-right conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen. If you were an elite conservative, you might be embarrassed too.

    The conservative intellectuals once were able to work together more effectively with the conservative unwashed. Now, more and more, their recent irritation renders them akin to the Stalinist commissars mocked by poet Bertolt -Brecht, who asked if they might “dissolve the people/And elect another.” The bargain the right has offered the downwardly mobile, culturally insecure traditionalist—give us your votes, and we will give you existential certitudes in a world that seems somehow to have gone crazy—is looking less like good politics all the time.

28. Aron Goldman Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 1:47 pm

    Palin Remains The GOP Grassroots’ Gal
    Many Republicans see the news media as the villain in Palin’s saga.
    http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/pi_20090711_7914.php

    Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s abrupt announcement that she intends to leave office 18 months early caused plenty of GOP operatives to wonder aloud whether she will be dismissed as a quitter if she makes a bid for the presidency in 2012. But the road to the White House runs through Iowa and New Hampshire, and grassroots activists in both kickoff states generally give Palin’s decision more-positive reviews. Her prospects seem especially bright in Iowa.

    “She’s still tremendously popular here,” said Mary Ann Hanusa, who chairs the Pottawattamie County Republican Party. Hanusa noted that at her group’s central committee meeting on July 6, just days after Palin’s surprise declaration, “I heard a lot of comments [such as], ‘I still like Sarah. Sarah’s my girl.’ Her well of goodwill is still very deep in this part of Iowa.”

    Hanusa said that the party activists she talked to accept Palin’s explanation for stepping down — that is, to spare her state the distraction of what she views as frivolous ethics complaints filed against her and to shield her family from merciless press scrutiny.

    “I haven’t heard any second-guessing,” Hanusa said. “People think she’s been treated abominably by most of the mainstream media, and they don’t like it. If anything, it’s more of a sympathetic feeling, in that they understand that she would have every reason to try to protect her family and step aside.”

    Hanusa attended the 2008 Republican National Convention as a delegate for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who swept the Iowa GOP caucuses last year on the strength of his appeal to evangelical Christians, the kind of voters drawn to Palin’s social conservatism. Hanusa hasn’t picked her favorite for 2012 and wouldn’t predict which of those two potential contenders would capture the Iowa caucuses in a showdown. But she said of Palin’s prospects, “All things being equal, I would say she would do quite well.”

    Another one of Huckabee’s key Iowa supporters in last year’s caucuses, Carmine Boal, is ready to back Palin should she decide to seek the Republican nod in 2012. Boal, who was a well-regarded state legislator with strong ties to social conservatives when she endorsed Huckabee in 2007 — before he won the state GOP’s straw poll that year — said Palin demonstrated an attractive energy on the stump as the running mate of last year’s GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, that could make her a formidable challenger to President Obama.

    “We’re up against a very charismatic president that’s got a lot of star power, and we’re going to need someone with that kind of draw,” said Boal, who retired from the Legislature last year but remains active in party politics and is the development director for the Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education.

    Boal, who co-chaired the Legislators for Huckabee Advisory Committee (Iowa) in the run-up to the 2008 caucuses, predicted that Palin could prove to be a formidable general election candidate, running well among women and independents. In 2008, the nation’s voters “went with a very left candidate with charisma and star power,” noted Boal, who asks, “Why can’t we go to the right with a charismatic candidate” in 2012?

    But to reach the general election, Palin would have to win the nomination, and Huckabee still has plenty of fans in Iowa. GOP activist Danny Carroll, who co-chaired the former Arkansas governor’s caucus campaign, said that he’s not ready to switch his allegiance. “It would take something significant to move me away from Mike Huckabee,” Carroll said.

    He readily admitted, however, that Palin is “very popular” in the state and that her unorthodox moves could work in her favor: “I perceive that people will say, ‘That’s what we’re looking for, someone who is willing to step out and do something different.’ ”

    Like most other Republicans, Carroll brushes aside the news media’s latest questions about the Alaska governor’s suitability for high office: “We’ve had such a bellyful of critics of Sarah Palin, what’s one more voice in the din?”

    Indeed, according to a July 6 Gallup/USA Today poll, 76 percent of self-identified Republicans said that the media’s coverage of Palin has been “unfairly negative.” And 72 percent of surveyed Republicans said they were likely to vote for Palin if she seeks the presidency in 2012. (Nearly half of those Palin boosters described themselves as “very likely” to back her.) That’s a formidable bloc of enthusiasm for any candidate to take into a nominating contest, even if those numbers are somewhat inflated by Palin’s strong name identification.

    Yet not all Republicans see Palin as a viable option for their party. Doubts are particularly widespread among those with experience running campaigns. They look at Palin’s sudden and at times wandering exit-strategy statement and wonder whether she has the discipline and bearing to be an effective candidate. “By looking like she’s sort of rootless and mercurial, she almost disqualifies herself,” said Iowa GOP strategist Doug Gross, who chaired former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2008 caucus campaign but is uncommitted for 2012. “She’ll have a group of people who remain Sarah Palin fans, but as far as the gravitas required to run a presidential campaign, she’s made it next to impossible to accomplish,” said Gross, a prominent Des Moines lawyer and party power broker. “You don’t turn tail and run if you want to run the free world.”

    Veteran GOP New Hampshire operative Joel Maiola, who managed George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign there and now runs Granite Edge, a strategic consulting firm, echoed Gross’s concerns. “She doesn’t scream ‘presidential,’ ” Maiola said. He speculated that Palin is best known for being parodied as clueless on Saturday Night Live. “I think that’s a persona that’s going to take work to overcome,” Maiola said. “I don’t know if people will give her a second chance.”

    Such views are not pervasive among the party’s grassroots, however. Rank-and-file Republican activists find Palin’s seemingly unstudied approach refreshing. “One of her strengths is that she’s willing to do things in an unorthodox way,” said former New Hampshire GOP Chairman Steve Duprey, who was a senior adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign.

    Duprey added that although resigning is a “risky move,” Palin may have decided that she had little choice, given Alaska’s distance from the early battleground states and their GOP voters, who expect to be arduously courted by any presidential candidate. The expectation of face time with any contender who wishes to be taken seriously is simply the dominant feature of the political culture of New Hampshire and Iowa.

    Moreover, because those states have enjoyed an enviable position as hosts of the two kick-off contests for presidential nominations, their voters see it almost as their civic duty to give every candidate a fair hearing, no matter how he or she has been portrayed in the national media. That kind of open-mindedness could enable Palin to reintroduce herself, even to skeptics.

    “She will appeal to the conservative base of the party and probably have her greatest strength drawing votes there,” Duprey said. Despite the backbiting in the press from other former McCain campaign staffers who have trashed Palin’s performance on last year’s campaign trail, many McCain voters “will give her an initial favorable look,” Duprey predicted. “Nobody in real America gives a tinker’s darn about that stuff [in the press], and I count myself among that group,” he said. “The campaign is over, [and former McCain aides should] let it go.”

    Iowa lawyer Richard Schwarm, who was the senior adviser to Romney’s Iowa caucuses campaign, is somewhat “puzzled” by Palin’s sudden announcement that she is stepping down, but he discounted the notion that she is a quitter who couldn’t withstand the rigors of a lengthy presidential campaign. “I hear that from people who would have never supported her in the first place,” he said.

    Schwarm noted that although he thinks Huckabee remains the 2012 candidate to beat in Iowa, McCain wasn’t always the most disciplined candidate and yet he won the 2008 nomination. “Spontaneity may be the style,” Schwarm said. “And [Palin] has got the star quality at a time when Republicans are looking for some stars.”

29. Tommy Boy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 2:30 pm

    Miller,

    Here are the numbers:

    Moderate Republicans

    Pawlenty 68/17
    Palin 62/27

    Conservative Republicans

    Palin 84/9
    Pawlenty 83/11

30. Illinoisguy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    With Pawlenty a +51, and Sarah +35, it appears Tim is considerably stronger amongst moderates, which would be expected. They both do terrible in the general with overall moderates. That’s the big killer.

31. Tommy Boy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 2:47 pm

    But the overall point is that one would expect Pawlenty to perform much better than an out-of-state Republican in his home state among Republicans, considering that the state hasn’t gone red in decades.

32. Illinoisguy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 2:55 pm

    I agree…if I were a Pawlenty or a Palin fan, I would have been disappointed with this. And yes, I know if a future poll shows Mitt as Palin, or even Tim, I will be disappointed then too.

33. Aron Goldman Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 3:00 pm

    the overall point is that one would expect Pawlenty to perform much better than an out-of-state Republican in his home state among Republicans

    Much better? You predicted yesterday that Pawlenty would fare, overall, just four points better than Palin against Obama. Were you actually expecting Palin to outperform T-Paw among moderates?

34. Tommy Boy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 3:20 pm

    Aron,

    They are effectively equal among Republicans. What are the chances that Mitt Romney would be equal with her among Republicans in Alaska or Palin being equal with Romney in Massachusetts among Republicans? Wouldn’t you be surprised if Rudy’s favorables among New York Republicans were the same as Palin’s favorables among New York Republicans?

    I actually expected her to perform better than Pawlenty among Republicans but that’s just my prediction. I believe the conventional wisdom would be “how the hell is Sarah Palin as popular with Tim Pawlenty among Republicans in what is perceived as a deep blue state.” However, there is no conventional wisdom because the mainstream media doesn’t respect IVF polling…thus, the reason for why PPP and Rasmussen don’t get any press.

35. Matthew E. Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    Tommy Boy,

    I would expect that Palin has higher favorables, among homestate Republicans, than probably 17-20 GOP Governors. Maybe Carcieri, Pawlenty, Daniels and Hoeven edge her in their states (though Pawlenty doesn’t edge her meaningfully if this poll is any guide). Certainly someone like Crist has worse favorables among Florida Republicans than Palin does, though he’s viewed as an extremely popular Republican in an ostensibly blue state.

36. Matthew E. Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 3:57 pm

    That’s a fascinating but pretty muddled article by Perlstein. It seems to argue that the gap between the grassroots and the elites is widening, and that a populist appeal is bad politics because…more people are drawn to populism and skeptical of right-wing economic policies. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It seems more sensible to say that if you share the goals of the folks who’ve been Republican elites for decades, a populist appeal makes less sense, because this time voters might actually take you up on the offer. In other words, there’s a greater danger that a kind of cultural and tonal populism will lead to class and economic populism. That’s a fair and honest assessment, and it’s a genuine danger though I think Huckabee, more than Palin, personifies that sort of danger.

    The article also makes savvy points about the potential decline of intellectuals in Republican circles. I’m no great fan of “pointy-headed intellectuals”, but I acknowledge their usefulness as a bulwark against the passions of the mob. Checks and balances and all that.

    But, Perlstein’s conclusions, and the conclusions of folks like Frum, are both bizarre and untenable; the assumptions are almost exactly what you’d expect to hear from those on their side of the elitists/people divide. For instance, if the populistic grassroots is becoming larger and more influential, then surely it makes no sense at all, from a practical standpoint, to come down squarely on the side of a dwindling minority (intellectuals/elites). It’s much easier to pacify minority members of the coalition on the back-end.

    Growing populism demands more care about offending populists not, as folks like Frum seem to believe, a bold break from populism. Frum’s case MIGHT make a decent principled argument; as an argument from pragmatism it stinks.

37. Illinoisguy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 5:05 pm

    This is just for the cry babies..the rest of you can move on! Almost funny how so many Palin lovers like to play the whine game. Do you have any idea how many million times I’ve heard Mitt called a flip flopper, or how many lies I’ve heard told about his health care, or how many times somebody has said he was for ‘gay marriage’? I, along with many others on here have had to defend this great man from all kinds of idiotic remarks for 2.5 years now. But, when somebody says something like Sarah Palin is not currently prepared (which is as plain as the nose on your face) we’re accused of bashing Palin. BULL CRAP!! Some things are pretty danged obvious for those that don’t have their head in the sand! At least we tell the truth when we point out her deficiencies. So, don’t come on here and try to play the victim! Your candidate may someday be a rising star, but right now she is unprepared for POTUS. If you want to take that as a trash statement, oh well, but its not 1/10 as bad as what had been thrown at Mitt Romney on here. Until recently, we went months without a single FPP. Thank goodness Mark has come through, and Jason had a good thread yesterday. If you run short on crying towels, stop crying!

38. Illinoisguy Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 6:05 pm

    Sorry, I just get tired of people acting like its a one way street.

39. Heath Says:
    July 12th, 2009 at 1:25 am

    Why are we still talking about Palin?

    She won’t run for anything ever again – unless she really does have ADHD in which case she will be laughed out of the race.

    She QUIT for god sakes. Move on!